The patron saints of tailoring, it seems, include Homobonus, who 'all week long cut garments that were miraculously assembled' every Sunday while he was at Mass, and Bartholomew, a victim of flaying, who 'carried his skin draped over his arm' rather as if returning with a suit from the cleaners. Whether either of them would be happy to retain his patronage of the scissor-men after leafing through Farid Chenoune's heavyweight dossier - in which the dandy and the incroyable give way to the quiet gentleman and the dégagé sportsman, only to be followed by a collapse into androgyny, street-wise dumb insolence and 'a syncopated disestablishmen-tarianism' - is problematical. This book packs some of the nastiest shocks since Richard Walker in The Savile Row Story (1988) disinterred a Lloyd's Weekly News headline on a sweatshop exposure of 1892: 'The Duke of York's Trowsers Made in a Fever Room.'

LRB 21 July 1994 | PDF Download